Gaslight Grimoire_ Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes - Barbara Hambly [88]
Of all the stories I had heard in that sitting room over many years, the one that Holmes told that evening was the most astonishing, and it was but the first act of the even more astonishing drama that was to follow shortly and which nearly cost us our lives.
The first phrase that my friend heard urgently repeated by that spectral voice was chilling. “Brouwer was murdered by the same men who murdered me,” Holmes quoted.
“I tried to ask questions, but I had no more success at first than Hamlet and his colleagues when they were addressing the ghost on the battlements of Elsinore,” Holmes said. “Then abruptly the voice varied its refrain.
“‘Brouwer was murdered by the same men who murdered me, John Openshaw.’”
Holmes said that he almost bit through the stem of his pipe in astonishment. As contemporary readers of my writings would have known then (and possibly readers of this account will still recall) Openshaw was a young man who sought Holmes’ help when threatened by former members of the Ku Klux Klan. They believed he had custody of family papers implicating them and some now-prominent Southerners in criminal activities in the years after the American Civil War. My friend had outlined a course of action that might have placated the KKK, but Openshaw was fatally assaulted and dumped into the Thames that very evening. As I recounted at the time, this had a profound effect on Holmes, who vowed to make retribution for Openshaw’s murder a personal crusade, saying:
“If God sends me health, I shall set my hand upon this gang. That he should come to me for help, and that I should send him away to his death—!”
Within the day, by making full use of his remarkable deductive and reasoning powers, Holmes had identified Openshaw’s killers. They were the captain and two other crew members of the barque Lone Star out of Savannah in the state of Georgia. That very morning the ship had sailed for America, but Holmes instantly put into motion a plan that would guarantee the three murderers were brought back to London to stand trial. Alas, that never happened. A shattered sternpost carved with the initials “L. S.” was spotted far out in the Atlantic, and the barque and all aboard her were presumed to have perished in a fierce equinoctial gale.
“But in fact the barque did not founder in the storm. Openshaw explained that to me, once we began talking freely. That and very much more,” declared Holmes.
I regarded my friend closely. It was obvious that he was in deadly earnest and not deceiving me with some cunning stratagem, as when he led me a few years previously to believe he was dying from a nameless ‘coolie disease from Sumatra’. I decided to remain silent, although harboring grave misgivings about where the conversation was leading. Holmes may have sensed my unease, for he begun speaking more and more rapidly, rushing through the next part of his story.
To his astonishment and relief, Holmes had found this supposed spirit of John Openshaw bore him no malice and was not seeking revenge for having been so casually sent to his death. Against the three KKK members, however, he was set on deadly retribution. For that reason his spectral form had joined the Lone Star before it quit the Albert Dock.
“Openshaw told me that what did founder in those dreadful gales was the mail-boat carrying my letter to the American authorities laying out the case for a charge of murder against the three men. The faster mail-boat had overtaken the barque before the storm struck, and the bag containing that note was among the wreckage recovered by the Lone Star. Hoping for negotiables or even currency, the KKK murderers opened all the envelopes and thus discovered that their crime was to be exposed.
“As I remarked at the time, they are cunning devils. Openshaw told me how they dumped overboard the sternpost and some other fittings to make it appear that their own ship had sunk